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One “script” of pornography is that “All women want sex from men”. Ask any woman… well, maybe not ANY woman… make sure it’s someone you have a safe relationship with. But almost any woman would tell you that this simply isn’t true.
Yet, one of the messages that porn sends is that women are simply on standby, simply waiting for any man to ask them to have sex.
Another “script” of porn is “Women like all sexual acts men perform or demand”. In other words, whatever a man wants, a woman is there to make you feel good. Sadly, this is partially to blame in the dramatic increase of cases where girls have been coerced into oral sex, anal sex, threesomes and other types of sex they, truthfully, weren’t in favor of. The guys buy into this message and they feel like the girls actually really want it, they’re just playing hard to get; so they pressure the girls into it.
The final “script” of porn is “Any woman, who does not at first realize this, can be persuaded with a little force.” In other words, the girl says “NO”, but she really means “Yes”. She actually wants you to pressure her into the act.
The truth is that if she says “No”, it’s because she actually means “NO”.
As a father of a little girl whom I love dearly, I have this singular message to other girls:
If any guy pressures you sexually, he does not love you. Period.
Because love is seeking the best of somebody else.
So, getting back to the “script” of “Porn doesn’t affect me”, we see the mythology of this very clearly. In fact, when men who view a lot of pornography are asked about the severity of a sentence for other men convicted of rape, they almost always say a much lighter sentence than those who don’t view porn. They justify the rapist’s behavior. “He couldn’t help it.”
Then there is the myth that people convince themselves of that says, “I’ll quit later”. You see a lot of this from single people who think that once they are married and they are sexually active with their spouse, all desire to view porn will go away. The truth is that anyone who cannot control their sexual urges before marriage will have the same problems after getting married. If you don’t have the discipline before marriage, it doesn’t magically appear after exchanging vows.
In all truthfulness, there are times as a married couple when your spouse can’t have sex: perhaps they are sick, traveling for work, or stationed abroad in the military…
What do you do if you hadn’t learned self-control before getting married?
The more accurate way to pop the bubble of this myth is to look at the nature of the human brain.
In Dr. Joe Mcilhaney’s book “Hooked”, he says, “The human brain is without question, the most complicated three-pound mass in the universe.” There are more connections in the human brain – over 100 trillion – than all the internet connections in the entire world.
Now, the brain has many distinct features. One of which are neurons. They are the primary cells of the brain through which electricity flows and connections take place. By adolescence, there are 10 billion neurons in your brain. Then there are the support cells. They hold the neurons together and help them with electrical flow. They also remove waste. There are 100 billion of these in the brain by the end of your teenage years. Next are synapses. These are the connections between the neurons that allow them to communicate with one another. There are over 100 trillion of these by the end of adolescence. What’s crazy is that, on average, the brain isn’t even completely formed until a person is 25-years-old. One of the final sections of the brain to form and mature is the decision-making section of the brain.
This means that our experiences and our beliefs shape the physical structure of our brain. It’s not fixed like concrete, but actually moldable and pliable throughout life.
So, in this development, experts often say that “Neurons that fire together, wire together” – which means that neurons fire when we have a certain experience and then behave a certain way. Over time the neurons connected with the experience and the neurons connected with the behavior begin to interlock, or wire, together.
Think about it this way: If you take monkeys and, as terrible as it sounds it’s been done, sew their middle and index fingers together. Despite the fact that they have distinct synapses in the brain relating to each finger separately, when the laces are untied, the monkeys still move their middle and index fingers together because the synapses become wired together. This happens in the physical structure of the brain.
This shows how our behaviors form certain patterns that get locked into the very structure of our brains.